8 posts tagged with "Writing"

The safest way to organize notes with AI is to let it change how a note is written and never what it says. MindMax quick notes work that way: every typo, misheard word and broken sentence is corrected, the thought is filed under the right heading, and nothing you did not say is added — no facts, no conclusions, no firmer wording than yours.

That sounds like a small distinction. It is the whole difference between a note you can trust next month and a note you have to re-check.

To have AI edit a Word document with tracked changes, the AI has to change the .docx itself instead of handing back rewritten text. In MindMax you @ the file, describe the change once, review the edits in groups, and the ones you accept are written into the same file as Word tracked changes — styles, numbering and headers untouched.

That sounds like a small detail. It is the whole difference between an edit you can send to a client and an afternoon spent rebuilding a document that used to be fine.

To review a Word document with AI and send back real comments, the AI has to anchor each comment to the words it is about, and you have to be the one who decides what is sent. In MindMax you say what the review is for, adopt the drafted comments you agree with in your own words, and export them into a copy of the .docx as ordinary Word comments.

The point of a review is not the opinion. It is an opinion the author can act on, on the sentence it is about, in the file they already work in.

To write a thesis chapter with AI without losing the argument, settle the thesis and outline yourself before any prose is drafted, write from your own sources rather than the model's memory, keep a running record of what the draft has already argued, defined and promised, and review every AI change as a marked edit. Also: check your institution's rules on AI use before you start, not after.

The usual approach — ask a chat assistant for one section at a time — produces sections that are each fine and a chapter that does not hold together.

To answer an RFP, tender or security questionnaire with AI, give it the questionnaire as the structure and your current policies as the only source, require a quote from a named document under every answer, and check every answer that states a number, date, certification or promise. Treat any answer without a quote as a question for a colleague, not a draft to send.

Drafting is the easy part now. The expensive mistakes are elsewhere.

To turn voice notes into Markdown without breaking your flow, use a global shortcut that opens a capture box over whatever app you are in, read the transcript before it saves, and save it to today's note as plain text. Only then — and only if you want — let AI tidy how you said it, never what you said.

The usual voice-memo workflow fails at the second step. You record, the audio sits in an app you never open, and the transcript, when you finally get one, is a wall of "um, so, the thing is".

AI edits to your writing should arrive as tracked changes — deletions struck through, insertions marked, inside your own text — so anything without a mark is exactly what you wrote and you can accept or reject each change. The alternative, a rewritten copy, forces a choice between rereading everything and trusting an edit you never saw.

On a paragraph, a rewritten copy is a small annoyance. On a chapter, it is the reason people stop letting AI touch anything that matters.

To turn a ChatGPT or Claude answer into a proper Word document, copy it with the assistant's own copy button (which gives you Markdown), paste it into an editor that renders Markdown and understands the assistant's equation format, fix it there, then export to .docx. Pasting straight into Word skips the step that turns the formatting symbols into formatting.

Everyone who has tried it knows the result: hash signs in front of headings, asterisks around bold words, tables that are rows of vertical bars, and equations that arrive as \frac{a}{b}.